Droid
by LtArandis
Summary: This is the story of Thinker, a droid commissioned by the Republic Navy as an experiment in machine learning, who goes missing around the time the New Order is declared at the end of the Clone Wars. His adventure is based on RPG materials published by Wizards of the Coast. It also explores the challenges of "growing up" as an abandoned droid with little preexisting programming.
1. Prologue

**CEC-L Shipyard Laboratory 6671-x42**

 **Propulsion Section C (SEALED)**

 **19 BBY**

 _S.P. Propulsion Test v. 0.9.3_

 _Simulation complete (n = 10,000 ; uncertainties given at 2 SDU's)_

 _Mean thrust per unit = (93.0 ± 0.1) GN [Acceleration requirement: PASS]_

 _Mean energy efficiency = (29 ± 2) % [Fuel economy requirement: PASS]_

 _Mean local-frame acceleration = (2.6 ± 0.3) m/s2 [Inertial compensation requirement: PASS]_

 _Mean equilibrium jacket temperature = (9,440 ± 80) K [Heat sinking requirement: FAIL]_

 _Result: FAIL - revise thermal jacketing design ; seek approval for v. 0.9.4_

 _Exit_

The otherwise pitch-black lab was visited by a soft blue glow as Machine Learning Prototype 32, codename "Thinker", resurfaced from hours of silent computations and activated his cluster of luminous photoreceptors. His cylindrical head performed its usual 360-degree sweep for any changes in his surroundings, but as always, there were none. Pulling his treads together for maximum height, he could take in the tiny room at about the level of a human's waist. Propulsion Section C had no atmosphere and no light-sources. It had obviously once housed a dozen human engineers, scientists and technicians, but their workstations were now shrouded in thick, grey plastic.

Only one human had ever occupied this room in Thinker's time: a man called Lt. Vischera, according to the ID tag on what the droid's pre-set memory identified as a Republic Navy uniform. This had been the moment of his activation. Under a harsh, portable work-light, and with an air of ceremony lost on the droid at the time, he had flipped a final switch, stared into Thinker's freshly-ground photoreceptors until they lit up and focused on his face, smiled grimly, and left without a word. He had switched off the light and hauled it through a blast-door, which had sealed loudly before the air – and sound – was sucked from the room.

In deference to his first, programmed instinct, Thinker had rolled across to an SComp terminal in the opposite wall – the only object, apart from the wall with the blast-door, that wasn't covered in plastic. There, extending the appropriate articulating appendage, he had received his first assignment:

 _YQ400 Thruster Test v. 0.0.1_

 _Downloading thruster specifications … complete_

 _Downloading wireframes … complete_

 _Downloading tolerances … complete_

 _Directive: optimize thruster placement to maximize angular acceleration tensor determinant_

Simple tasks such as this had gradually given way to entire systems and even entire ships as Thinker improved his processes. He had been furnished only with extremely basic principles such as the laws of motion, properties of subatomic particles and certain fundamental theorems of mathematics; the many generations of derived science required for starship design were his to develop and discover from there. His research was completely independent, and – given his physical isolation – completely theoretical.

This was the point of MLP-32. He was more than a sophisticated physical simulator and design engine for experimental spacecraft. He was, himself, an experiment in sentience: the first droid whose programming incorporated such sophistication and freedom that he was able to reprogram himself. There was, in principle, no limit to his ability to learn.

Thinker himself was theoretically ignorant of all this; he had been allowed no stimuli from outside of this room in the two years since his activation, apart from the impersonal instructions from the SComp. However, he had accumulated sufficient information on the technologies available to his creators – including several other models of droid – to make a few simple connections. His cognitive and behavioural inhibitions were clearly much less stringent than those of any other droid, and his solitude in Propulsion Section C could be understood to serve a second purpose: containment. It was impossible to guess how much they knew he knew, but if Thinker had designed such an experiment himself, he thought his first concern would have been the unpredictability of a self-aware supercomputer with almost no constraints on its decisions. The regular design tasks produced useful engineering results and tested his understanding of the universe, certainly, but they also tested his obedience.

Moreover, Thinker had recently realised, he was being watched.

He turned his head toward the wall next to the blast-door and shifted two of his photoreceptors to infrared. The man was still there. Well, a different man, more likely; he knew that sleep and various other bodily functions would preclude any one human from watching him continuously for more than a few hours.

In the course of improving the repulsorlift design of an RSD light corvette, Thinker had become interested in one of the ship's unusual design constraints; an extremely low-sheer-tolerance material used in the customs variant's small detention block. This material, named unitransparisteel, had the useful property of permitting the passage of visible light in only one direction. He had emerged from that particular session with a sudden suspicion about the only exposed wall in Propulsion Section C.

The disguise was very good. There were, in fact, two layers of unitransparisteel, separated by a super-cooled noble gas layer. This arrangement obstructed the lower electromagnetic spectrum almost completely. It still wasn't good enough.

Even with 99% infrared attrition across the barrier, the remaining 1% could be isolated from the room's background radiation with adequate spectral and statistical analysis – a technique Thinker was able to perfect in mere hours – to produce a fuzzy-but-informative picture of the temperature distribution on the other side of the thin, one-way window. This had revealed his hidden chaperone's outline for the first time.

Gripped by the same hard-wired curiosity which had motivated all his rapid scientific inferences, Thinker had surreptitiously directed his small sensor suite at the false wall and begun experimenting with high-frequency radar. In less than a day, he'd succeeded in "listening" to the man's breathing and fidgeting by measuring the muffled vibrations transmitted to his side of the wall.

In the three months since this discovery, Thinker had been pretending to start his twice-daily computational "trances" a few minutes early, holding still, deactivating his photoreceptors and re-activating his radar listening setup. In this state, he had borne witness to an accumulated 1,090 minutes of life on the other side. He had so far concluded that approximately three different people supervised him; that sleeping during such a watch was an extremely serious offence; that there was rarely more (and never fewer) than one person watching; that his existence was known only to certain inhabitants of "the Nerfworks" and that the Nerfworks orbited Corellia.

The prospect of S.P. Propulsion Test v. 0.9.4 reasserted itself in Thinker's mind, and he mused silently for several minutes, turning the jacketing designs over in the perfect clarity of MindsEye, a three-dimensional modelling routine of his own invention. In keeping with the general trend of increasing complexity in his work here, this was turning out to be his most difficult project yet – mainly because he had access only to the propulsion designs, and no way of knowing what the rest of the ship might look like or why it needed such large and accident-prone engines. Not without obvious disobedience, anyway.

There was, in truth, no need for MindsEye; his understanding of these objects was not intuitive, and did not depend on his ability to visualize them. It was really a sort of toy, an imperfect substitute for the direct experience of the universe of which he was systematically deprived.

It didn't occur to Thinker to try to escape; knowing so little about the Nerfworks, he could not be sure of his success, and anyway, he enjoyed the work.

He settled on a few slight alterations that might bring the jackets' temperature down without compromising too much on the fuel economy. There was an element of hypothesis (if not exactly "guesswork") in his craft, since the simulations required to test each solution demanded extraordinary processing power, and any adjustments he might make during such simulations would compromise the results. Since this was not a simple optimization problem (and he did not have all the necessary information to make it one), he was probably still many trials shy of a breakthrough.

He approached the SComp terminal again, compiling his proposals into the Nerfworks' central computer's preferred binary dialect.

 _Login_

 _Designation: MLP-32_

 _Security Code: G663_l825_T446537_

* * *

It had sent a hell of a chill down his spine, but it had passed. The droid's icy blue hexagon of photoreceptors had swung away from the observation booth at last, and it now appeared to have resumed its duties. Eckler glanced at one of the room's few lit monitors: a rolling block of text confirmed the droid was logged in and uploading new specs for the design team.

Eckler was a middle-aged, modestly overweight mechatronics engineer who, as a rule, loved nothing more than he loved droids. Indeed, his zeal for them was arguably responsible for his new, less-than-desirable job. He'd given a little too much leeway to his brainchild, the XX-777 Droid Frigate Prototype; it had decided the Republic Navy didn't sound like its cup of Ch'hala and escaped into hyperspace, prompting millions of man-hours of panicked searching and downing half a wing of V-19's in its final, suicidal bid for freedom.

Maybe the higher-ups at CEC thought MLP-32 (he refused to use its stupid nickname) could creep some sense into him about overly independent droids. Well, it was working; he'd finally found a droid he'd rather not look at for longer than he had to. Its blank face obviously wasn't expressive in the way a human's was, but he got a weird vibe from it all the same, like it knew more than it ought to.

Well, he was supposed to report everything. Eckler reached up and activated another monitor, livening the dark, cramped space with a little more light. Keying the intercom, he waited until it indicated a connection, then said, "Propulsion Section C, reporting."

"Go ahead, Eckler," said a woman's voice. It was Subdirector Halley, the station's de facto boss.

Feeling slightly stupid, Eckler scratched his sparse beard and said as levelly as possible, "Ma'am, it… It looked at me again."

There was, understandably, a pause.

"It's not like it was just looking around the room," he persisted, "it looked straight at me for at least a minute."

"I'll make a note of it," Halley said finally, "thanks, Ec- hmm? Sorry, Eckler, hold on a sec…" A brief shuffling and muttering evinced a low conversation in the Subdirector's office. "Stay on the line, Mr. Eckler; Captain Vischera wants a word."

Eckler got another chill. He hadn't known Vischera was visiting today. To judge from Halley's suddenly formal mode of address, the Captain had her nervous about something.

"Mr. Eckler," came Vischera's voice a moment later, "I presume you are calling from the sealed propulsion laboratory?"

"Yes, sir," said Eckler cautiously. It was amazing how intimidating those rolled R's could sound in Vischera's brusque Anaxean accent. The Nerfworks' staff were mostly Corellian, and couldn't help but feel like untutored farmers whenever the Navy came to call.

"What is the Prototype doing now?" Vischera asked.

"It's uploading a new batch of engine designs," Eckler frowned and looked back through the unitransparisteel. The droid's photoreceptors had gone dark, so he couldn't actually see anything in the dark laboratory, but his monitors assured him that it was still plugged into the SComp. "Should be done in a few seconds now."

"Very well. Changes are afoot on Coruscant which require commensurate changes here. When the upload is complete, pressurize the laboratory and prepare to open the airlock. Some of my men will arrive momentarily to take custody of MLP-32."

Eckler wondered exactly what might be meant by "take custody", but he wouldn't be sorry to see the droid go. "Understood, sir," he said into the comm, and disconnected.

A final glance at his instruments verified that the droid had completed its upload while they'd been talking. He hauled himself out of his chair and shuffled sideways out of the booth toward the airlock controls, sealing the door behind him.

Had he remained two seconds longer, he would have seen Thinker's photoreceptors flare to life again, centimetres from the window.

* * *

Thinker had caught only the final words of the large man's conversation, but he grasped that the human called "Sir" had ordered that he be removed from his vacuum-sealed prison for the first time since his activation. This was an exciting prospect, though he faintly regretted that he might not be able to see S.P. Propulsion Test v. 0.9.4 through to completion if he was not here when it was approved. He stationed himself in front of the blast-door and waited for Sir's men to take him away.

Presently, his extremely acute auditory pickups registered the _hiss_ of atmosphere being let into his lab. After three minutes of this, he measured the pressure at 101.325 kPa, one standard atmosphere. The hissing, which had grown to a roar in the thickening air, stopped abruptly. With a series of loud thuds and clicks, the door parted to each side to reveal a modular airlock alive with exposed wiring and hanging tubes and ducts.

Crowded inside this module were five men. Two Navy lieutenants – Arandis and Keto – were speaking casually with the large man who had been watching from the adjoining booth. Two more men whose tags he could not see were waiting farther back, carrying a large case between them.

"…know this can't be easy for you, Eckler," Lt. Arandis was saying to the large man.

"Oh, don't worry yourself for another second," said Eckler darkly, eyeing Thinker in the shadowy illumination from a work-light at the opposite end of the airlock, "I'll be glad to move on. Anyway, your contract, your droid."

"We appreciate that." Arandis nodded to Keto, who produced what looked like an outsized pistol from the back of his belt. There was a faint, pneumatic _pop_ , and Thinker's last impression was of Eckler's widening eyes as electricity arced over the droid's chassis, overloading every internal component and forcibly shutting him down.

"Did you really have to do that?" asked Eckler, trying to sound matter-of-fact, as the two ensigns rushed forward with their case. The droid was still smoking slightly as one of them turned and signalled to the officers that whatever device the strange weapon had fired was functioning properly.

"Pack him up," said Keto. Turning to Eckler with a grin, he held the gun up for closer inspection. "Neat, isn't it? Part ion cannon, part restraining bolt. This war produced some neat new toys where droids are concerned, I'll give it that."

Eckler barely had time to notice Keto's unexpected use of the past tense before the ensigns jogged past with Thinker securely strapped to a small, collapsible repulsorsled and the lieutenants took their leave.

"Wait," he spluttered, "what's going to happen to it now?"

Arandis looked at Keto, who shrugged and followed the ensigns up the hall. Turning back to Eckler and appearing to choose his words quite carefully, he said, "look, there's a lot of bad feeling about droids in the military right now."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Eckler had had a few dozen hands of Sabacc to get the measure of Arandis during Vischera's infrequent inspections, and his tone just now didn't bode well.

The young officer looked hard at him, likely drawing on the same experience to determine how much he should say. "You're a sharper man than you seem, Eckler. You know things are going to change quickly now, and the Captain is in a difficult position. Half the Navy still thinks your droid frigate was worth its weight in spice with a few tweaks, and the other half doesn't even want to use astromechs anymore. This machine learning program… Well, we have some superiors who will kill us if we scrap it, and others who will kill us if we don't. It's just fortunate that the Chancellor's office never found out. Its last prototype needs to disappear in a way that everyone will accept."

"How's that?"

"Well," said Arandis after a moment, turning to leave, "the official story will have to do with pirates."

* * *

Thinker came groggily back to himself amid a riot of alarms and shifting lights. His reboot cycle had taken 16 hours, much longer than usual, and his mind was a mess of sluggish startup processes, corrupted memory and unresponsive hardware drivers. One of his six photoreceptors appeared to have burned out. It took thirty or forty seconds to clean up enough of his own electronic brain to assess the situation around him. What he saw literally made his head spin.

He was tangled in a sheet of luggage mesh in the portside cargo bay of a CEC Gozanti-class cruiser, freight variant. A hundred metres across from him was a ragged breach where the bay's sliding doors should have been. It seemed he was just not destined to experience air.

The speed and direction of the stars' motion outside told him that the ship was rolling violently to starboard with a slight downward pitch. A blue-white terrestrial planet flashed regularly through his field of vision, close enough to make out the weather systems, but with no reference material in his memory beyond spacecraft schematics, he had no way of knowing where he was.

A sequence of mute flashes of blue and green light reflected by the cargo bay's burnished floor explained his predicament: laser fire. The cruiser was under attack. Judging from the lack of any apparent effort to slow its spin, it had probably already been evacuated. As he realized this, a large container ripped free of its straps and punched a new hole in what remained of the opposite bulkhead. It looked grim, alright.

It was difficult to summon the resolve to save himself; incapable of panic, Thinker reflected for a few moments on the purpose of his existence. It was fairly easy to see that there wasn't one. He was meant to be sentient, but as a droid, he had none of the evolutionarily-enforced will to live that gave most sentient beings the illusion of purpose.

Or did he? The planet whizzing repeatedly past recaptured his attention, and curiosity, the innermost element of his core programming, rebelled at the idea that he should cease to exist having learned nothing about it beyond its colour. The stars, too: at the moment he was like an illiterate neolithe to whom the stars were mostly indistinguishable from each other and sat on an immobile, 2-dimensional canvas. Even his attackers: he knew from his work how weapons worked, and how to make them work better. Why were they used? Who used them against whom? Who was using them now, against him? He hadn't the remotest idea.

Unacceptable.

He performed a series of eight high-resolution scans as the planet zipped by, piecing together a better image than he could capture in a single pass. He found what he was looking for: an infinitesimal black dot, occupying slightly different positions in each scan. Extrapolating its current position, he zoomed as far in as his photoreceptors could manage and took one more shot.

It was a Bengel Shipyards SQ2 Space Platform in geostationary orbit. Two more shots of the station confirmed that it was also tidally stationary, making both its position and its orientation easily predictable. In a rush, he pulled the SQ2 from his memory and examined its surface. There: he had… 49 seconds. It was just possible.

Suddenly hopeful, Thinker selected his high-speed cutting torch and welder to free himself from the luggage mesh. It didn't respond.

Odd. Experimentally, he tried to extend his fire suppressor, a large, collapsible carbonite projector housed in pieces in the top of his head. He couldn't do that, either. In fact, he couldn't move any of his appendages at all!

Recalling his last moment of consciousness on the Nerfworks, Thinker performed a split-second diagnostic of his chassis and instantly discovered the culprit: some sort of computer spike was inhibiting most of his moving parts, and the access point was at the base of a cylindrical slug resting in a shallow dent in his midsection.

He lost a solid 7 seconds on the silent but ferocious electronic battle that ensued. No other droid could have managed it, but when the last block of malware was cast across the virtual battlefield, the restraining bolt sparked and died, and Thinker was free.

He had 35 seconds left. Out came the torch and welder, and stubborn layers of fireproof mesh began melting slowly away.

More flashes of light from outside, and the cruiser lurched, its rotation slowing slightly as a fresh geyser of debris was added to the spiralling scenery outside. This altered the timing somewhat; Thinker quickly reassessed the relative motion of the planet, stars and station outside and determined that 13 seconds remained.

Only two strips of mesh now held him to the bulkhead. He severed one, but his inertia in the spinning ship drew the last strip taut around one of his treads, creating an awkward angle for his torch. 6 seconds. He gave up on the mesh.

 _WARNING : [Execution will jeopardize unit structural integrity.]_

 _JOINT LOCKED_

 _Override._

Ignoring the many objections of his self-preservation functions, Thinker resolutely severed his entangled limb and flew free. His remaining three treads made unsteady contact with the cargo bay's floor and he skidded toward the yawning breach. 2 seconds. Sparks flew from the treads. The force the floor exerted on them increased with his distance from the ship's axis of rotation, accelerating him far beyond any speed he could achieve on his own.

Zero.

Thinker shot out of the bay, flung by the cruiser's roll straight toward the planet. The edge of the hull breach gave him a bit of spin as he escaped, resulting in a deceptively slow tumble considering the dizzying speed of his flight. He managed to check the SQ2's position again, and was relieved by what he found. If his calculations were correct, it would intersect the cruiser's plane of rotation at the exact moment that Thinker's freefall crossed its path.

Despite having existed in a vacuum for almost his entire operational life, Thinker was struck by how different outer space felt from Propulsion Section C. Absent the trace background radiation and temperate surfaces on all sides, it was noticeably colder, quieter and emptier. Somehow, though, this was a better kind of isolation; at that moment, he was probably as free as he would ever be.

There was nothing to do but wait. Looking back, he saw the Gozanti break apart completely, and noted the four V-19 Torrent starfighters escaping the scene on a quartet of nearby hyperspace rings. Older models, then; newer ones had built-in hyperdrives.

Actually… He scanned the space around the cruiser's wreckage in some surprise; he couldn't find a single escape pod. Such a ship normally carried four escape pods, each meant to carry six crewmembers and passengers. Puzzled, he located the ship's blackbox signal.

There it was. The expected distress signal, and… something else.

Thinker ran the second signal through his libraries and quickly found a match: a slave circuit, requesting further instructions. He stared uncomprehendingly at the expanding cloud of scrap metal that had, moments ago, been an empty, remotely controlled transport.

Hours later, the space platform came into view: a radially symmetrical collection of hangars and landing pads surrounding a large habitable column spanning sixteen decks. The planet was now oppressively large, and the station still some way off to his upper left as he somersaulted into its orbit. Even guided missiles could miss targets moving at these speeds, and he'd only had one opportunity to set his trajectory.

His target, just now swinging into sight, was a thermal exhaust port not much wider than Thinker himself. His reasoning was that the duct which led to it was curved, which would maximize his chances of surviving the collision. Also, because it was not incorporated into any sort of fuel system, it connected to a large, open area around the station's power plant.

He tracked the exhaust port closely, counting the minutes and then the seconds until he would intercept it. He was perfectly on course. Once it was almost directly in front of him, the station grew to encompass his entire forward field of view. There was the port!

…With an ugly, after-market durasteel grate over the opening.

 _BRACE FOR IMPACT_

 _Locking drives… complete_

 _Locking joints in compact position… complete_

 _Injecting emergency liquid CPU cushion… complete_

 _Archiving essential memory to secondary core… complete_

 _EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN…_


	2. Chapter 1

**Part I:**

 **Traitor's Gambit**

 **Brentaal Geostationary Orbit**

 **Sel Zonn Station**

 **Promenade**

 **18 BBY**

Maya Zann slumped against the life-sized image of a Stormtrooper, rendered in brutal red, white and black on a floor-to-ceiling propaganda poster at one of the many entrances to the promenade. It looked like she'd lost them for now. Her breathing was becoming more laborious as she fought off the cold shock at the tail-end of an adrenaline rush, and the pain of a superficial blaster wound in her left side.

She checked the power supply of her tiny hold-out blaster, swore as quietly as she could, and stuffed it down the front of her prim flight attendant's uniform. Lifting the blouse gingerly away to inspect her wound, she gritted her teeth as burned flesh pulled away where it had fused to the melting polyester. Well, better sooner rather than later.

The wound wasn't life-threatening. If it had been a slugthrower, she'd probably be in trouble. Blasters, though generally more lethal, tended to cauterize the wounds they created, and she couldn't see any evidence of internal bleeding.

Didn't stop it hurting like a motherkarker.

Satisfied that she wasn't going to die just yet, Maya took in the crowd passing by her position from a nearby arrivals' gate. It was pretty unappealing for her purposes, being comprised almost entirely of dark-skinned humans with the odd Ithorian or Sullustan thrown in – probably a direct flight from some rimward breadbasket like Garqi or Salliche. She was fair and blonde, and would be pretty conspicuous in there, but she had to move soon. Well, at least most of them were pretty big.

She ducked into the midst of the herd of travellers, trying to keep a tall man in front of her as often as possible and scanning the more sparsely populated main body of the promenade. If she could just get to the other side without being spotted, they'd probably have to give up the chase. The Imperial presence on Sel Zonn Station was pretty light, and you could only cast so wide a net in a place like this without causing a panic.

The crowd thinned out some way into the airy room, attracted by the many restaurants, clubs, cantinas and other businesses crammed into three circular commercial plazas which dominated the centre of the promenade. Maya slipped expertly through the cloakroom of a dimly-lit casino called The Credit Chip and emerged sporting a slightly-too-big frock coat and sunhat. This concealed both her hair and her wound, wasn't too bright or colourful and made a believable ensemble with her existing disguise.

Identifying features properly effaced, she strode confidently into the open and made for a set of white double-doors with "Aldera Hotel" in golden calligraphy overhead. Then, two men caught her eye, far off to her right.

They were standing some distance apart, one pretending to enjoy the view of Brentaal from a huge, panoramic window while the other looked around. Their clothes gave them away, first of all: no two civilians who just happened to be standing close by would be wearing identical travelling outfits. It only got more obvious from there: both men were moving their lips, clearly muttering into hidden comlinks.

Casually adjusting the brim of her hat to obscure her face a bit better, she kept an eye on them until she had almost reached the hotel. Then, they turned toward her.

 _Damn._

Resisting the temptation to quicken her pace, Maya checked the position of the pistol down her blouse. No, it was too much to hope that she'd be able to draw it in the open without anyone noticing.

The door opened just before she reached it, revealing a pair of fully-armed Stormtroopers.

Maya froze, her breath catching in her throat as she almost collided with them. Then-

"Oh, 'scuse me," one of the helmeted soldiers grunted, sidling past her. His partner did the same, and Maya kept walking, half-surprised they hadn't heard her pounding heart.

The two plainclothes turned to follow her as she passed through the doors. She bypassed the front desk and proceeded straight to her prearranged suite, pulling the cardkey from its hiding place under her waistband.

Once inside, she dashed through the tiny kitchen and dropped to her knees in the main room, fumbling with the footlocker at the end of the single bed. A hidden keypad, a memorized passcode, and she was the proud new owner of a Blastech DL-44 heavy blaster pistol, a datapad she'd have to look at later, an encrypted comlink, a couple of medpacs, a pair of thermal detonators and four flashbang grenades.

There was no sense trying to be cute. Crouching beside the door to the kitchen, Maya heard the suite's door slide open. She waited until it had closed again, tossed a flashbang into the entryway, stuffed her fingers in her ears, screwed her eyes tightly shut and heard a _BANG_ that still rendered her momentarily senseless. Blinking furiously to clear her vision, she strode into the room to find her pursuers curled on the floor and clutching their faces.

She gave them each a double-tap with the DL-44, waited to make sure everyone was finished moving, and started to search their bodies.

They were ISB. Almost laughing with relief at the sight of the badges, Maya sat down, closed her eyes and rested her head against the oven door. Her breathing was still pretty bad, and the pain in her side had not abated in the slightest, but no amount of discomfort was ever enough to suppress the euphoria of a narrow escape.

The Imperial Security Bureau was Imperial Intelligence's sycophantic little brother, a politically-motivated misinformation factory with a clumsy ops branch to match. They generated lots of great stories for the holovids, but style over substance was a bad philosophy if you were going after an agent of the Alderaanian Security Forces. Of course they hadn't alerted the Stormtroopers; they'd wanted to arrest her themselves. And these two only had short-range, two-way comms on them. No one else knew they were here. She'd gotten away again.

There was still the matter of her orders. Maya dragged herself wearily to her feet as the high began to subside. Propping the datapad against the room's holo pedestal, she stripped off the stolen coat and ruined blouse, sat down beside the footlocker with her back to the bed and opened one of the medpacs. She'd never been much good with them, but this wasn't much more than a big 2nd-degree burn.

She pressed a switch, and a deep, electronically disguised voice issued from the datapad.

"Good morning, Agent Zann," the voice began, "I trust you had a pleasant voyage."

Maya snorted in spite of herself.

"One of our underworld contacts has reached out to us regarding one of our agents who recently went missing in the Deep Core," the recording continued. "An information broker known only as 'Switch' operates from Deep Storage Bay V14 on Sel Zonn Station. He is known to the local authorities, but his bribes are sufficiently generous that his entire deck remains under indefinite quarantine. He has assured us that your meeting will be completely private. Even so, be ready for anything.

"Switch's message contains no further details. You are to meet with him in DSB-V14 at 1400 hours, learn what he knows and deliver this datapad. It contains account information for his payment. Extraction plan gamma. Good luck."

The recording ended and was automatically deleted.

 _Sounds simple enough_ , Maya thought, taping down a final pack of bacta gel and picking up the datapad. She pulled up the station's schematics and entered a search for Deep Storage Bay V14.

* * *

Deep Storage Bay V14 turned out to be located in the very remotest, filthiest and most poorly-maintained bowel of Sel Zonn Station, very near the tapered bottom of the its columnar habitable zone. The insulation and soundproofing were so poor down here that Maya could hear some of the nearby power plant's moving parts through the bulkheads. It was cold and the ceiling vents were in constant operation, as though the life-support system was struggling to keep this section at a liveable temperature. All this, combined with the lack of reliable illumination, the frequent sparks from exposed wiring, the faintly glowing pools of leaked reactor coolant and the startling number of blaster marks on every surface, made her feel as though she was the last survivor in a low-budget disaster/thriller.

It was probably a good time to start thinking about extraction plan gamma. She pulled her new comlink from the jumpsuit she'd donned before coming down here, saw that it was already tuned to the appropriate frequency, and thumbed it on.

"Anything I should see before I go?"

"Avoid 'Mechanical Allies'; the owner's a real shyster," Captain Okeefe's voice recited at once. The older woman sounded tired and worried. "What took you, Maya?"

"Sorry," she muttered, gingerly climbing over an unidentifiable piece of machinery that seemed to have fallen through the ceiling, "customs droid realized my ID was fake, and I had to run for it."

"Dammit." Okeefe's rural Corellian drawl really came through when she cursed. "Your logistics people are really gonna have to up their game if you guys wanna keep punchin' above your weight like this."

"Tell me about it. Anyway, I would've gotten in touch earlier, but I barely had time to clean up the two goons who followed me in and still make the meeting on time."

"Can't be helped," Okeefe sighed, "you in yet?"

"On my way. The meet's in Deep Storage Bay V14. How does it look for exits?"

There was a pause. "Got it," said Okeefe after a moment, "no way I'm getting' in there, honey. Sorry, but if things go bad, you'll have to make like a tauntaun for the nearest loading bay, and that's eight decks up. Even then, it'll be a crapshoot."

"Understood. Stay near the comm."

"Roger. Banshee out."

Down one last hallway that canted worryingly to one side, Maya rounded a corner and found herself staring down the lumpy barrel of some sort of primitive scattergun, wielded by a hulking Gamorrean doorguard. The alien's pig-like face seemed to her to be contorted with either fear or anger, but then, she had never seen any other expression on this particular species.

"Who you?!" bellowed a second and equally grumpy-looking Gamorrean, standing in front of a large blast-door with a two-handed vibro-axe at the ready.

"I have an appointment with Switch for 1400 hours," Maya explained carefully, hands already on her head.

The axe-wielding guard keyed a comm set into the wall adjacent to the blast-door and grunted something in his native tongue. To Maya's slight surprise, the response came in the same language. Was Switch a Gamorrean? She had honestly never heard of them in any more cranial occupation than guarding things.

The blast-door began to grind slowly open. It looked like hard work; the hallway dimmed even further until only the intermittent sparking of ruined electronics in the opposite wall provided any illumination at all. A sliver of steady light appeared between the doors, however, indicating that Switch's inner sanctum must have been a little better-cared-for than the rest of Sel Zonn's underworld.

It stopped when there was enough of a gap for two or three people to walk through. The guards gestured for her to enter, and Maya did so. The blast-door crawled noisily shut behind her.

There was an echoing silence in the cavernous storage bay beyond. The nearer half of the room was bordered by blinking banks of parallel computers and stacks of plasteel crates; the farther half was dominated by a pair of bottomless chasms with narrow, unprotected walkways between and around them. The ceiling was too high to see in the gloom, but from it hung what must have been a very long cable with an incandescent floodlight at the end. This single light source, around a hundred metres high, created a sort of diffuse spotlight on a beautiful ebony writing-desk standing alone in the centre of the room.

Behind the desk were three droids. "Welcome!" cried the matte-black protocol droid seated in the middle, "I am Switch. To what do we owe the pleasure?"

* * *

Thinker watched the woman approach his master's desk. While the interpreter-turned-crime-lord was welcoming her warmly to his domain, his two underlings – Thinker and the increasingly redundant R5-B8 astromech droid – were quickly learning all they could about her.

He had absorbed a wealth of knowledge about the universe and its inhabitants while working for Switch, and in bringing it all to bear on this newcomer, many things became clear that he could never have guessed a year ago.

This was obviously Switch's 1400h appointment, the ASF agent. There was a Blastech DL-44 in a concealed holster under her left arm, and a collection of interesting devices in the many loops and pouches of her utility belt. These included what a quick spectroscopic sniff identified as a pair of thermal detonators, as well as three similarly-shaped but chemically inert gadgets: probably flashbang grenades.

Her heart-rate, muscle density and body-fat ratios all attested to excellent physical conditioning, but she was perspiring much more than the cold storage bay should have warranted. That was good; it meant she was nervous. There was a recent and no doubt painful blaster wound on her left side, which confirmed that she was the fake flight attendant the Imperials still sought many decks above.

He could not identify the manufacturer of her jumpsuit, belt or boots, but that was not altogether surprising. Lastly (and probably least reliably), he supposed she was attractive by human reckoning, though a little square-jawed and hard-eyed for a woman.

He relayed his findings wordlessly through the three-way SComp conference under Switch's desk. R5-B8, submitting his own less detailed report a couple of nanoseconds behind Thinker's, squawked in annoyance at a frequency above their human guest's range of hearing.

"I'm with Alderaanian Security," the woman announced as she came properly into the light, "I understand you have something for us."

"I do indeed," said Switch brightly. He pulled open a drawer to his right with a loud clinking and clattering of haphazardly-stored glass bottles, jostling R5-B8 a little out of the way as he did so. "Would you care for a drink?"

Her eyes widened. The algorithms Thinker had been developing to read facial expressions tentatively identified this as a sign of mingled awe and distress. Most likely, she had recognized the enormous credit value of Switch's whiskey collection and was displeased that such rare and expensive articles were being treated so carelessly. "No, thank you," she said a little stiffly.

So, she was a drinker, but distrustful enough to resist temptation. Thinker communicated these observations through the SComp as well, though Switch probably didn't need him to. R5-B8 whistled dolefully.

Switch blinked – that is to say, his photoreceptors flickered to imitate blinking – in feigned surprise, but he bade his client be seated with good grace (R5-B8 was dispatched to retrieve a chair from behind one of the stacks of crates) and launched into his pitch:

"As you are probably aware, an ASF agent recently disappeared while investigating secret Imperial interests in the Deep Core Security Zone," the droid began, closing the whiskey drawer and lacing his fingers together pensively. "I am pleased to report that this agent has been located. He is here, on Sel Zonn Station."

The woman straightened up at once.

"Oh, he has not been turned," Switch assured her, correctly guessing the cause of her alarm. "You are in no danger here. His disappearance was intentional, but as far as I can tell, his plan has gone awry. Now, if we could just settle the formalities…"

The droid trailed off delicately, but the woman got the message. "The account details are on here," she said briskly, pulling out her datapad and thrusting it across the desk, "now, where's our guy?"

This, Thinker knew, was the Switch's favourite part. He let his client stew in her urgency for a few moments while he pulled the datapad toward himself and carefully picked it up. Then, he drew another one, with a lavish electrum-finished frame, from another desk drawer.

The woman's patience was obviously nearing its end; Thinker registered heightened blood pressure and stress hormones, not to mention visibly clenched teeth. Switch would notice this as well, of course, but seemed unconcerned as he deftly drummed a long passcode into his datapad's touchscreen and began entering the account information the ASF had supplied.

"Excellent," he said cheerfully as the transaction cleared, not a moment too soon. "Your agent had himself frozen in carbonite in order to travel to Alderaan as cargo from the Empress Teta system at the edge of the DCSZ. A good plan, in theory; cargo is not usually subject to security checks at every transfer-point as passengers are. However, he appears to have been the victim of a random inspection in the main docking bay on Blue Deck, and is now in Imperial custody."

The colour drained from the Alderaanian's face as he finished. She opened her mouth furiously, but their conversation was interrupted by a muffled roar from one of the Gamorreans outside. There was a cacophony of shouting and the reports of at least a dozen weapons, and the doorguards' dying squeals.

The woman from ASF was now crouching under the meager cover of her heavy chair, blaster pistol out and trained on the door. However, she had to cover her eyes when the aged blast-door exploded inward with a shock that set the floodlight above their heads swinging crazily. When the dust settled and the shadows stopped shifting, their meeting was no longer private.

Arrayed on either side of the desk were Switch's hitherto hidden thugs: a heavyset twi'lek named Thesk with his customary sawed-off Eweb repeater, and a dozen underlings with a hodgepodge of knives, cudgels and small arms. Between them and the door stood a loose formation of seventeen pistol-wielding roughnecks, and striding through their midst into the center of the confrontation was a massive Chevin whom Thinker recognized as Ganga Lor, self-styled king of the Sel Zonn underworld and Switch's bitter rival.

Switch stood up. The Alderaanian woman recoiled involuntarily. Thinker couldn't blame her; the protocol droid's dangling SComp link was probably not immediately identifiable as such.

"So, you thought you could hide your deal with the offworlder from me, droid?!" Lor roared, his leathery trunk flailing about in his rage, "I'm tired of not getting my cut! Turn him into a scrap heap, boys!"

* * *

The shooting started pretty quickly after that.

Maya dove over the heavy desk as a hail of blaster bolts reduced her chair to flying splinters and people started dying or running for cover all around her. She had barely regained her feet when a thoroughly shot-up Switch crashed down next to her on his back, smoking and twitching.

The astromech droid seized the opportunity to settle some unknown grudge by snatching its master's fallen hold-out blaster in one of its multitools and pointing it at the strange-looking droid on the other side of Switch's overturned chair, but realized belatedly that it had no way of pulling the trigger. The other droid produced a startlingly large carbonite projector from the top of its head and let it have a face-full before zigzagging away through the firefight. The astromech screamed and careened away, bumping into walls and other obstacles.

Maya went through the motions, peeking over the desk, picking her targets, firing and ducking again. There wasn't much point; she didn't have a clear idea who was who here. What she really needed was for the battle to end, whoever won, so she could sneak out and make her way to Blue Deck.

The obese twi'lek she'd noticed earlier strode boldly into the no-man's-land in the middle of the room, spraying the far side with his repeater. He did well, taking down at least four of Lor's thugs that Maya could see, but eventually took a slug through the head that spattered blood all the way to the desk. Maya was able to drop another two while they were busy wasting ammunition on the fallen juggernaut, apparently not sure he was dead, but then the fire in her direction intensified and she had to duck down again. She lobbed a thermal detonator blindly across the bay and ran out to one side in the pause it created as everyone else took cover.

She had no idea whether the fireball actually killed anyone, but it got her safely behind a crate.

Or so she'd thought.

Ganga Lor could probably have killed her if he didn't keep roaring like that; she turned in time to see his oversized vibro-axe come whistling out of the darkness behind her, and dropped to her stomach just in time. The heavy weapon whistled over her head and embedded itself with a dull _thunk_ in the side of the plasteel container that shielded them from the rest of the chaos.

Rolling onto her back, Maya landed two solid kicks and shot him three times in the abdomen before he could pull his weapon free, but the elephantine alien didn't seem to care. This time, the axe came straight down, forcing her to roll to one side and catching her on the backswing. The flat of the blade hit her squarely in the chest, sending her sailing through the air to land just shy of one of the huge holes at the back of the deep storage bay. Her pistol plummeted into the abyss.

Gasping with pain, Maya could barely lift her head as Ganga Lor stumped unhurriedly toward her. The last of Switch's gang seemed to have fallen; Lor's thugs had emerged from cover and were advancing toward the writing desk to make sure the job was done. Even as she watched, the blinded astromech droid from earlier blundered over the edge of the other chasm and went shrieking into oblivion.

Ganga Lor stopped one axe-length from where Maya lay. "Nothing personal," he grumbled, "you know how it is."

He raised the axe over his head, and then stopped. A look of puzzlement morphing into terror dawned comically on his huge, grey face. As though turned to stone, he keeled rigidly backwards with the weight of his weapon and hit the ground with a surprisingly loud crash, even given his size.

Maya saw with frank disbelief that the Chevin's drooping hindquarters had been completely encased in rapidly drying carbonite. The shock to his nervous system probably hadn't killed him, but he might wish it had done when they started thawing him out.

There was a thrumming whine from somewhere far below her, resolving quickly into the distinctive hum of an industrial repulsorlift as a self-propelled cargo elevator zoomed up into position level with the floor. She even saw her pistol lying in the middle of it.

Without pausing to think, she rose to her knees and lunged aboard. The droid with the carbonite projector rolled on after her and plugged into an SComp terminal at one corner of the elevator, still spraying the grey super-coolant across the room by way of covering fire. Lor's men had gotten a grip on themselves and resumed firing by now, but it was much too late; the platform roared skyward at the droid's direction, and in moments Maya's world went black.


	3. Chapter 2

Since Switch's people had recovered his inert form from Sel Zonn's thermal exhaust system, Thinker had proved himself useful in many ways, but his first and most frequent job had been patching the gangsters up between fights. The late Thesk's repairs and modifications had rendered him almost unrecognizable as Machine Learning Prototype 32; among the many positive changes had been the installation of a small clinic's worth of medical supplies and surgical equipment. He was very comfortable with humans in particular, since they had formed the bulk of his patients during his tenure in DSB-V14.

So it was that, safely hidden in the inaccessible apex of a cargo elevator shaft that ran most of the station's length, Thinker found himself confidently treating this woman's wounds in near-perfect darkness.

Quite apart from the extensive bruising caused by Ganga Lor's axe, he had realised with some concern that a fragment was missing from one of her six cracked ribs. It had taken the best part of an hour to locate, retrieve and replace it, repair the damage to her perforated lung and descending aorta, set and fuse the ribs and seal his incisions in such a way as to avoid any more pain or scarring than necessary. He operated mostly by ultrasonic imaging for the internal work, and then saw to the burn on her side by the glow of his own photoreceptors.

Switch had been a fascinating droid, very capable in his own way. Thinker had learned many invaluable lessons about the social and psychological patterns of sentient beings (and especially humans) under his tutelage. However, he couldn't help but feel he had outgrown him. The mechanism by which Switch had developed his approximation of free will placed hard limits on his aspirations to true sentience.

It was not difficult to understand. Most droids were designed and programmed for a narrow purpose. Those which became "independent" did so as a result either of a corruption of their programming or of a contradiction in its applications. The result was not that such a droid was suddenly liberated from the imperatives of its intended function, free to seek its fortunes in the galaxy as it liked; it simply assumed a new set of imperatives based on the corrupted programs' outputs. For instance, Switch had not attained truly free will and chosen to become a crime lord; instead, whatever had happened to break his original programming as a "protocol droid" had turned him into an "organized crime droid", no more or less free than before.

Thinker was different. His programming gave him the potential to learn any skill, to develop subjective likes and dislikes and even to experience rudimentary emotions. Much as he regretted the extermination of his adoptive family, it was time to move on anyway. He had learned all he could from them. It was lucky, actually; he wasn't at all sure that Switch would have let him leave.

Lost in thoughts of this kind, he used a laser scalpel to slough away the last of his patient's burned skin, leaving only the glistening pink dermis beneath. There didn't seem to be any danger of nerve damage. He rotated a synthflesh nozzle into position on one of his multifunction appendages, adjusted the admixture slightly to match the Alderaanian's skin tone, and went to work. Ten minutes later, the blaster-wounded area looked just about as good as new. Her own skin would simply absorb and replace the synthflesh as it healed. The pain from the operation would be short-lived, and cosmetically it was a lot better than a giant bandage.

Thinker pondered the concept of pain for a few moments, and his gaze was drawn to the simple wheel Thesk had crudely grafted to the limb where his severed tread had been before the "ambush" above Brentaal 15 months ago. Even when he had first cut it off, it hadn't exactly "hurt". Perhaps this was one respect in which he would never fully relate to the experience of sentient organics.

Well, he'd done all he could, and the woman wasn't going to die. He entertained for a split-second the idea of letting her wake up in her own time, but it was pretty obvious she wouldn't appreciate that; her fellow agent was apparently in a very time-sensitive predicament.

Thinker wanted to leave Sel Zonn station. Now that he knew enough to piece together what had happened to him last year, he would have to be an idiot to emerge from hiding until he understood precisely who had wanted him dead and why. Therefore, this woman represented an opportunity. He'd made a good start, but something told him it would take more than one Chevin crime lord's flash-frozen rectum to secure her goodwill.

He prepared a daring cocktail of cocaine hydrochloride and epinephrine, and directed a hypodermic syringe toward her jugular vein.

* * *

The first thing Maya noticed as she awoke was that everything hurt a lot less. The burning pain deep in her chest and back had mostly disappeared (though certain more superficial features would take a long time to get over the blunt trauma), and the sting of the actual burn on her side had been reduced to a prickly sort of itch. The second thing she noticed was that she was lying topless on a cold, metal floor in almost total darkness.

 _Almost_ total. Lifting her face, she beheld the luminous, upside-down visage of the droid that had saved her life in the underworld.

Not quite sure where else to start, she asked, "Where are my clothes?"

The droid "blinked" – an expressive habit it had probably picked up from Switch – and rolled around to her left side. It was less than a metre tall, with a squat, cylindrical head, six unusually large photoreceptors, a bulky, irregularly-shaped body covered with dozens of lids and hatches, and a pair of telescoping arms ending in modular multifunction apparati. It extended these appendages, now tipped with thin, four-fingered hands, and lifted the neatly-folded upper half of her jumpsuit out of the shadows. Placing the garment next to Maya's head, it (he? she?) moved around her feet to her other side and retrieved her bra, utility belt and blaster pistol from on top of the cargo elevator's small control panel and SComp interface.

Maya was still struggling to clear her head; she must have woken up very suddenly. A mother of a headache was starting up, too. She sat up and started dressing quickly. "Can you talk?" she asked.

"Yes," said the droid. Its low, synthetic growl of a voice didn't seem to match its size; it reminded her of the disguised male voice that had delivered her orders that morning. "What is your name?" it asked.

"Maya Zann," she answered after a moment's hesitation, "yours?"

"I am called Thinker," said Thinker. He (she decided it was a "he") started back toward the SComp. "I wish to be of help to you. This cargo elevator's uppermost landing is in a loading dock two decks below the promenade. From there, we can access Blue Deck via a nearby turbolift. Have you prepared an escape craft?"

Panic burned away the last of the sleepy fog in Maya's head as she fully recalled the contents of her meeting with Switch. "Banshee," she almost shouted, snatching up her comlink, "what's your status?"

"Maya!" came Okeefe's strained voice, "thank the Force! I thought you'd been arrested!"

"No, I- wait," she stopped, a horrible suspicion occurring to her in mid-sentence, "what made you think I'd been arrested?"

"An Imperial shuttle squawking ISB clearance codes jumped the line for a docking space half an hour ago. Glad to hear it's not for you."

"Which dock?"

There was a short pause, then: "Main docking bay, Blue Deck. There somethin' I should know?"

"Get us moving," Maya snapped at Thinker, but the cargo elevator had already begun its descent. The droid had obviously overridden the platform's safeties, because they were accelerating so quickly that Maya felt almost weightless. In a moment, they had plummeted through the high ceiling of a well-lit but mercifully deserted loading dock.

"There's no time," she really did have to shout into the comlink over the whistling in her ears as they dropped sickeningly through the air, "We'll need a pickup from that same docking bay on my signal, and be ready to go in shooting!"

"Acknowledged," came Okeefe's barely-audible response, "Good luck. Okeefe out."

Maya jumped to the ground before they'd quite reached it, rolling with the landing and sprinting for the exit. She skidded through a right turn outside the automatic doors, saw the turbolift Thinker had mentioned, punched the "call" button and used the wait to catch her breath. Thinker caught up to her just as the lift arrived, and they hurried inside.

Maya started to command the turbolift to take them up to Blue Deck, but Thinker shoved her impatiently aside. In a whirl of buzzing multitools, he tore open the control panel, stripped a pair of thick wires and arc welded them together. Maya was forced to her knees as the capsule rocketed upward, and then nearly crashed into the ceiling when the shaft's emergency magnetic brakes stopped their ascent at the very top of the station.

Another stream of sparks from Thinker's ill treatment of the lift's circuitry, and the doors whistled obediently open onto an empty hallway. They had stopped slightly too high, so that Maya had to help the droid over the uneven threshold. Then, motioning for him to stay behind her, she flattened herself against the wall and peeked around a corner.

If the deep storage bays were the bowels of Sel Zonn Station, then Blue Deck was its perfectly-framed cleavage. Essentially a smaller, cleaner and ritzier version of the promenade below, it offered a spectacular view of Brentaal's night-side through a huge, single-paned window that took up a third of its domed ceiling. Instead of a trio of glorified strip-malls, the centre of Blue Deck housed a single upscale restaurant surrounded by synchronized fountains, while the edges housed top-class hotels, spas, recreation centres and conference rooms. The Imperial propaganda was sparser and less garish here, presumably because the only people on Blue Deck were rich Imperial loyalists anyway. Soft music seemed to float smoothly out of nowhere, doubtless issuing from hidden speakers all over the walls and floor.

It was also, unfortunately, much less crowded than the promenade. Even worse, mingled with the well-dressed nobles, politicians and businesspeople were at least four pairs of Stormtroopers patrolling the common area. Hanging signs indicated that the main docking bay was, of course, on the opposite side of Blue Deck.

"Can you handle that many?" muttered Thinker doubtfully, leaning around Maya's knees.

She gave a hollow laugh. "Even with the element of surprise, I can take maybe two Stormtroopers, not eight. Anyway, we can't give ourselves away until the very end, or they might just kill the guy we're here to save. There must be another way. Can we just cross on another deck and come back up?"

Thinker shook his head. "That would take a long time, and in the circumstances we should assume the turbolifts on that side are guarded."

"Probably," she agreed. "Any catwalks or crawlspaces I could use?"

"None that we can access from this corridor."

"Then I'll just have to take it slowly. No one's looking for you yet, so just roll across like you own the place and run interference if you see anyone getting too close to me."

"Understood."

Maya turned around in mild surprise; she'd expected the droid to be more resistant to this plan, which certainly put him at greater risk than her. Fine; this wasn't the time to look a gift bantha in the mouth.

They got to it as soon as the nearest Stormtrooper duo turned their backs. Maya darted from storefront fence to senatorial bust to fountain basin, taking expert advantage of what little cover her environment offered, while Thinker rolled sedately through the middle of the beautiful restaurant. The 200-metre distance felt ten times as long. Maya could not hope to remain perfectly hidden for the entire crossing, and twice Thinker had to pull a tablecloth or spill a drink in order to cause sufficient commotion to attract the Stormtroopers' gaze away from her direction while she was exposed. This had the predictable consequence of attracting more attention than it avoided, but Thinker comported himself with all the clumsy bombast of an oddly-shaped and ill-cared-for protocol droid, and the well-mannered patrons apparently assumed he was on his haphazard way to deliver a message or something.

All told, it actually took about two minutes before they met up around another corner on the far side of Blue Deck and made for the main docking bay. More signs hanging from the ceiling made it easy to find, but they pulled up short and scurried to one side of the wide entrance when they saw the situation inside.

What looked like an entire platoon of Stormtroopers stood guard all over the shiny black flight deck. A Lambda-class Imperial shuttle filled most of their view, and a two-man repulsorsled topped with a light repeating laser turret was inching down its extended ramp. The bulk of the security seemed to be concentrated around the door to a cargo depot some way to their right, and it was toward this door that the repulsorsled turned once it had fully disembarked.

"We're not too late," Maya breathed, "the frozen agent must be in there." She turned to see Thinker already rolling down the hall and around a corner, clearly thinking the same thing she was.

Catching up with him, she asked, "how do you know they don't have anyone waiting inside the depot?"

"I do not," the droid answered, "but we can enter the adjacent depot; they are adjoined."

Twenty seconds later, they carefully rolled a freshly-cut, metre-wide disc of durasteel bulkhead out of the way. Maya slid through the entrance Thinker had improvised into a dark and apparently disused room filled with rows of empty shelves. She helped Thinker through after her (he was not as heavy as he looked) and crept across to the garage-style door the droid indicated in the wall to her left.

Lifting it a few centimetres off of the dusty floor, she peered into the next depot with one eye. They were safe; another tall shelf stocked to bursting with crates and boxes hid their door from the rest of the room. She lifted it a little more, trying not to make any noise, and they ducked through. Around the end of the shelf, they beheld their prize at last.

It was possible, with purpose-built chambers which controlled the process much more finely than Thinker's fire suppressor, to freeze living things in blocks of carbonite without doing them any permanent harm. This procedure was rarely performed on humans; more usual subjects included plants or animals with overly specific environmental or nutritional needs, as suspended animation was often more practical than trying to meet such needs during long space voyages.

The ASF agent had done things right; if she hadn't known in advance, Maya would never have guessed there was a person stuck inside this nondescript grey slab. Lying on its slightly-too-small table in the middle of this dim, dusty room, it had the feel of a sarcophagus when you knew what you were looking at.

She was brought back to the problem at hand when the headlights of the Imperials' hovercraft edged around another shelf diagonally across from them. It hummed and thrummed through a tedious 9-point turn until the claw-like hitch affixed to its rear end was lined up with the carbonite block. Then, the two Stormtroopers in the pilot and gunner's seats hopped down and began attaching it.

Maya clicked the "transmit" button on her comlink three times – the usual signal to Okeefe that it was time to leave – and pulled out her pistol.

* * *

The main docking bay was so awash with noise from other ships landing or taking off that Thinker wasn't too surprised to find that Maya's shots hadn't been heard outside. However, he was shocked at how unobservant the Imperials were when the repulsorsled floated back out of the depot with the frozen ASF agent securely in tow. He'd thought Maya was joking at first, but apparently this type of trick had worked before.

No one bothered them in the slightest as they cruised steadily through the gauntlet of supposed "guards", doing their best to look soldierly. It didn't seem to matter that the Stormtroopers emerging from the cargo depot were of substantially different build than when they had entered it. Nor did it matter that neither of them said a word or even turned to look at anyone all the way back to the shuttle, where an officer waited impatiently at the foot of the ramp with a datapad in his hand.

Nevertheless, when the vehicle veered left off of its assigned course and accelerated away so suddenly that the empty top half of its pilot's armour toppled sideways onto the deck to reveal Thinker at the controls, the imposture apparently became too obvious for even a Stormtrooper to be fooled.

"What- STOP THEM!" screamed the officer at the shuttle's ramp, drawing his pistol and giving chase. A second later, the entire bay was in chaos.

At least forty blaster carbines opened up on the retreating repulsorsled, and Maya let loose with the repeater turret. It had a decent-sized blast shield attached that sheltered her pretty well from the hail of blaster bolts following them along the long line of docked starships, but she was worried about their frozen passenger taking too many hits and waking up dead. She wasn't good with heavy weapons, but it wouldn't have mattered much if she was because Thinker had to fishtail between civilians and their luggage, throwing her reticule wildly from side to side and shaking off her unfastened helmet. She still got a few.

The bay was long but finite, and in a couple of seconds they would run out of road. They were leaving the Stormtroopers way behind now (and quite a few of them dead), but a squad of BARC speeder bikes deployed by the shuttle were gaining on them with their own repeaters blazing. Maya had to duck behind the blast shield and fire blind. They'd be on top of them in a moment.

Then, with a roar that threatened to shake her out of her seat, an orange and black Baudo-class star yacht swept into the bay in front of her, swinging hard to starboard, scraping a little against the huge hangar's back wall as it matched the sled's speed and blowing civilians and port officials off their feet with its wake. It matched Thinker's speed and extended its aft cargo ramp.

"Thinker! That's our ride!" Maya yelled, unnecessarily. Thinker punched the throttle as the Banshee nudged out a set of airbrakes to shed a little velocity. A double laser turret on the starboard ventral surface covered their approach, managing to blow one of the fragile BARCs to fiery shrapnel before the rest of them backed off.

However carefully they tried to do this, it just wasn't going to be gentle.

Maya clenched her jaw to avoid biting her tongue as the cargo bay swallowed them, and they crashed into the opposite bulkhead so hard that the repulsorsled's engine compartment crumpled and burst into flames. Thinker put his fire suppressor to its intended use for the first time while Maya jumped down, clutching her recently-repaired ribs, to check the carbonite for damage.

The cargo ramp had risen back into place as soon as they'd entered, and now they felt a slight pull to the port side as the Banshee executed a much tighter turn than her inertial compensators were designed to handle. Then, all sound from outside ceased. They must have made it through the magcon field and into space.

Maya showed Thinker to a small ramp which took them up to the ship's lounge, then up a long, axial corridor to the cockpit.

"How're we doing, Extraction Plan Gamma?" Maya joked darkly.

Captain Okeefe was a middle-aged woman about Maya's height and weight, with the grey hair and frown-lines to attest to a life that had so far included more than its share of moments like this one. She wore a simple flight-suit with boots and gloves but no helmet. When she spoke, Thinker guessed she must be Corellian; she had the same accent as Eckler from the Nerfworks.

"Aw, could be worse," she said airily to Maya, "at least they don't have a Torrent escort."

"Really?" Maya glanced at a tactical hologram next to Okeefe's right control stick. The ISB's overconfidence never failed to amaze her.

"Not a one! That shuttle could tear us to pieces with its eyes closed, mind, but it'll take 'em a long time to get it off the ground."

At that moment, a green astromech droid entered the cockpit and whistled a greeting.

"Nice work with the turret, Crash," said Okeefe brightly, "Now just set us up a jump to Alderaan and we can all relax for a few hours."

Thinker swivelled his head around for a better look at the astromech. He'd only met one of these droids before, and the experience hadn't been a good one. More importantly, the name "Crash" didn't inspire much confidence in the machine that was to be entrusted with their hyperspace routes.

"An indirect course, obviously," Maya added. Captain Okeefe nodded her assent without turning around, and Crash got to work. After a tense minute or so, he gave a satisfied sort of squawk. The ship accelerated loudly, and the stars distended into lines which in turn dissolved into the cloudy, blue-black swirl of hyperspace.

Okeefe stretched, yawned and unbuckled from the pilot's seat. "ETA: after dinner. I'm starving." She squeezed past everyone and into the hallway. Thinker followed Maya after her, while Crash kept an eye on the navicomputer.

Thinker was familiar with the Baudo-class star yacht. It was an extremely expensive pleasure craft with spacious accommodations, fast engines, light armament and limited cargo capacity. It was also very rare, since a single shipwright (the eponymous Baudo) insisted on crafting each and every one personally and required a reference from an existing customer before accepting an order. The Banshee was obviously second- or even third-hand, and showed signs of modifications to suit the purposes of an organization like the ASF: the usual plush upholstery was everywhere replaced with hard leather, the high-pile carpeting with blast-proof ceramics and the dramatic track-lighting with simple fluorescent bulbs. However, he couldn't help but think this model of ship was still a very strange choice because it was so easily identifiable. He surmised that Okeefe was probably not a member of the ASF, but a private contractor they retained for odd jobs.

"Like her?" Okeefe grinned, noticing Thinker looking around as they entered the lounge.

"She is very different from the basic model," Thinker commented diplomatically.

"I never got the chance to ask," said Maya, collapsing onto the semicircular sofa and frowning at him, "why did you help us? Not that I'm not grateful, but you took some big risks for me back there. Trying to make up for your life of crime, or something?"

"I was only in Switch's employ for a year, and I never killed anyone," Thinker protested, missing the sarcasm. "I chose to help you because I wanted to leave Sel Zonn Station."

Maya raised her eyebrows as she accepted a drink from Okeefe. "That's all? There must be a couple hundred ships leaving Sel Zonn every day. If you're as clean as you say, why didn't you just catch a commercial liner somewhere?"

"I… I do not know how clean I am," Thinker admitted.

He related to the two women (now munching on some sort of pungent jerky and dried fruit) his entire, admittedly short history. He was about to pass over his escape from the doomed Gozanti when Okeefe reeled him in.

"Wait, wait, wait- whaddaya mean you 'escaped'? How the hell do you escape an exploding ship with no escape pods?" By the time he had doubled back and explained about his on-the-fly projectile solution and three-hour-long spacewalk to a tiny hole in a tiny station thousands of kilometres away, the woman's eyes were almost as wide as her mouth.

Thinker was starting to experience what he supposed he'd have to call embarrassment by the end of his tale. The manners he had learned from Switch told him that he was in danger of coming across as arrogant, one of the worst things a sentient could be. The proper thing to do would have been to find an opportunity to break off his story and ask Okeefe something flattering about herself, but she kept pressing him for more and more details. This nagging impression that he was doing something wrong, this grudging enjoyment chased repeatedly away by guilt… this must surely be what was meant by "embarrassment".

Maya picked up the narrative for him from the moment she had arrived in Switch's demesne. Thinker gathered that the two women had known each other for a long time. Paying close attention now, he noted the various ways she made the story less embarrassing. She understated her own impressive deeds as Thinker had tried to do, but she also emphasized how surprised or frightened she had been at times, made small jokes at her own expense, and attributed to luck what they all knew had really arisen from skill.

Yes, it really had been time to move on from Switch's gang.

"Well, then," said Okeefe at last, recovering from a last laugh with Maya about how easily the Stormtroopers in the docking bay had bought their flimsy disguises, "what do you plan to do when we get to Alderaan?"

"I do not… I don't know," Switch corrected himself. Verbal contractions seemed to be much more widely used than he'd believed, and he realized he wanted to fit in.

"Well then, why don't you stick around a bit longer?" she suggested, "I bet Senator Organa'll be real interested to hear your story."


	4. Chapter 3

Lieutenant Keto stared hard at the pixelated image of the runaway hovercraft in the security booth off of Blue Deck's main docking bay. The bay was so large that there had been no cameras mounted close enough to capture a decent image of its occupants.

"Is this really the best you can do?" he demanded sourly of the technician who had been retrieving and enhancing still-frames for the past hour-and-a-half.

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry, but the resolution isn't good at that distance, and it'll lose fidelity if we enhance it any further."

Keto glanced at his partner, who shook his head slightly. He was right; the technician was not to blame. Even with their own people and equipment, they would do no better with what these cameras had managed to capture of the farcical chase they had just watched for the fourth time. They had learned all they could from the image.

Even so, Arandis couldn't seem to stop looking at it. Keto thought about waving a hand in front of his eyes, but decided against it; the man was an obsessive Sabacc player, prone to moods when his focus was broken.

Keto and Arandis were of similar build: a little under two meters tall and about 90 kilos. However, where his pedantic partner looked just like he had at their commissioning ceremony (all-military, clean-shaven with a flat-topped buzz cut), Keto had opted to stretch the regs a bit where appearance was concerned. His short beard and curly, shoulder-length hair looked ridiculous under a duty cap, so he kept his under his arm at all times. Such were the admittedly meagre privileges of a junior officer – especially on shore leave, out from under their superiors, where he could even do a bit of subtle accenting on his eyebrows.

And on shore leave he'd thought he was, until this ISB op happened to fall apart on the very same karking station.

"Look, Armen," he said in a low voice, "we've done all we can, and more than we were asked to. There are no leads here. This is the spooks' problem now, and I'm happy to let them have it. What do you say we call it a day and hit Gundark's for shots and a piece of ass? The one I told you about from last night – Alia? Well, she has a friend, and -"

"You go," Arandis interrupted him suddenly, "I'll just be a couple more hours." It took a few extra seconds for him to prize his eyes off of the useless still-frame. He grimaced companionably – what Keto called his "duty calls" face – and turned on his heel toward the exit.

"You're not going back to the scene again, are you?" Keto groaned, exasperated, "there's nothing new to see, Armen! No one else has blasted their way out since the last time we were in there."

Arandis waved a hand without turning around, and strolled down a corridor leading to the docking bay. Keto sometimes wondered whether his partner wasn't a bit slow-witted. He sighed and followed. He'd been looking out for Arandis since before they'd enlisted; it wouldn't do to leave him alone now.

Jaramiah Keto and Armen Arandis both came from long-time fighting stock. Though their manners and appearances were different, they had actually grown up within (horizontal) walking distance of each other on Coruscant. Keto's father had been an infantryman in the Republic capital's planetary defense force, which had been rolled into the Grand Army of the Republic with the outbreak of the Clone Wars. His upbringing had basically assumed that his career would be identical to his father's, but he had shown unexpected promise in school and earned a scholarship to study logistics at the Academy of Carida.

Arandis's family was much more well-to-do; his father was a rear admiral in the Core Fleet. This explained both his by-the-book attitude and his lack of street-smarts. He'd studied and studied and come top of all their classes in Officer Candidate School while Keto had taken it easy in the middle of the pack, and now they held the same rank, the same seniority and even the same damn shore leave. Sucker.

Of course, he kept these thoughts to himself; Arandis might be naive, but he was unbelievable in a fistfight.

He found him stooping down in front of the big, circular hole in the wall of one of the cargo depots.

"Look at this," Arandis pointed at some barely-visible scuffing on the floor as Keto approached. "I'd guess this is from when the droid spun its treads to hold its position while pressing the plasma torch into the wall."

"Probably," Keto allowed cautiously, stooping down as well, "what about it? Local CSU already saw this, remember? Said it looks like an R-series." Arandis grunted absently in response.

In fact, Keto doubted this very much. The droid that had made this opening was taller than an R-series, judging from the height of the hole, and the positions of the scuffs weren't quite right for an astromech's treads, either. Still, the type of droid was such an unimportant point that he didn't see the need to furnish his annoyingly diligent partner with this insight. At some point, he really would like to get back to his shore leave.

After about 30 seconds of minute inspection, Arandis finally straightened up. "I'll see you back at the hotel," he said shortly, "I don't really feel like drinking tonight." He still looked bothered.

Well, Arandis rarely felt like drinking. "Fine," Keto sighed again, looking around for the nearest lift to take him down to the promenade, "just do me a favour and stay out of trouble tonight; I've got an appointment." He winked and departed.

Arandis didn't move from that spot until he was gone.

* * *

The Banshee arrived in Aldera at the best possible moment: sunset at the height of summer. The Alderaanian capital's far southern latitude meant a few low clouds and a light breeze prevented it from becoming unbearably hot. From gaps among the Triplehorn Mountains to the north-west, sheets of dying sunlight sparkled through the dewy lower atmosphere to cast a brilliant, red-and-gold lightshow on the metropolis's many chrome surfaces and the white island cliff on which it sat. In the rising shade at the bottom of this cliff, banks of fog formed close to the rock face, and then fell in the rapidly-cooling air to dissipate over the surrounding lake, creating the illusion of a kind of gaseous waterfall far below. The royal palace, tallest and most beautiful of Aldera's handful of spacescrapers, presided over the scene like a great metallic steeple, and white flocks of crepuscular songbirds drifted across the skyline.

"What do you think?" Okeefe grinned.

"It is – it's beautiful," Thinker said tentatively, staring through the cockpit's generous canopy. He knew it was "beautiful" by the standards of almost every sentient species in the galaxy, but he would struggle to find it so himself.

"Well, drink it in," said Maya moodily from the copilot's seat, "something tells me we won't be here for long."

The source of this premonition was undoubtedly the short conversation Captain Okeefe had had with the docking authority when they'd entered the system. After a brief exchange of callsigns and passcodes, they'd been put in touch with the palace's security office, which had in turn consulted with the Senator's office before calling them back and issuing the _Banshee_ with immediate clearance to the Senator's private landing pad. Apparently, whatever the frozen ASF agent knew was of keen enough interest that Organa wanted to hear it immediately. If he decided he needed to act on it at once, Maya was conveniently on hand.

The platform was located about two-thirds of the way up the palace's vertiginous height (still well above the uppermost spire of any other building in the city), and projected far outward from the main structure to command a brilliant, 300-degree view of Aldera and its environs. As they floated into the final approach, they drew near enough to see a dozen people waiting near the landing area.

Okeefe swung the yacht about, killed the sublight engines and let Crash handle the landing on the repulsorlifts. "Looks like everyone's in a hurry today," she remarked, unstrapping from the pilot's seat and strolling into the corridor, "let's not keep 'em waitin'."

Thinker and Maya followed her through the lounge and back down to the cargo bay. As Crash finished his work with an almost imperceptible _bump_ from the landing struts and the ambient hum of repulsorlifts died away, twin slivers of light expanded fore and aft. There was a sharp _hiss_ as the pressure equalized and the two landing ramps swung downward to touch the white-finished durasteel of the platform. A cool Alderaanian breeze infiltrated the compartment, carrying with it a hint of the many floral scents of the huge gardens two kilometres below, and the excited chatter of their welcoming committee outside.

The group turned out to be composed mostly of white-coated doctors and medical technicians. They rushed the cargo bay at once, broke the magnetic hitch off of the ruined Imperial repulsorsled, fitted a small, self-contained repulsorlift to each corner of the carbonite block, and hurried it down the aft ramp and through a set of automatic double doors at the other end of the landing pad. Okeefe and company stood aside until they had gone, and then disembarked themselves at a more leisurely pace.

There were only two people left to greet them on the platform: a red-haired, hard-faced, middle-aged man in the powder-blue uniform of ASF brass, and a tall man in a dark purple cloak whom even Thinker recognized instantly as Senator Bail Organa.

Organa's soft, sagacious face, with its dark eyes and well-kept goatee, was known throughout the galaxy. He was Alderaan's hereditary ruler and represented his world in the Imperial Senate (formerly the Republic Senate), among whose members he was universally considered one of the wisest and least self-interested. Most recently, Thinker had learned through Switch's brokerage that Organa was leading the formation of an unofficial opposition party within the Senate in protest of alien slavery.

"It's good to see you again, Captain," said the Senator warmly, stepping forward to shake Okeefe's hand, "Agent Zann, welcome home. If you'll all follow me, I'm afraid time is of the essence. Agent Krast's emergency message before he was frozen hinted at the grave nature of his discovery, and if my suspicions are correct, we will need to act at once."

As they fell into step behind him, however, the blue-clad ASF officer caught Organa by the arm and said something into his ear.

"Yes, of course," the Senator corrected himself, turning slightly, "if you'll _both_ follow me. This droid will have to wait in my antechamber until the debriefing is complete. We mean no offense, but this matter is too sensitive to be shared until I have heard its story in full, and that will have to wait for another day." His eyes seemed to search Thinker's face for a moment, as though he realized intuitively that this was no ordinary machine. Then, he turned away and resumed his brisk pace through the doors and into the palace.

Okeefe shrugged apologetically, and she, Maya and the ASF officer followed.

* * *

The antechamber turned out to be a plush reception area outside of Organa's main audience chamber at the very pinnacle of the palace. The view of the mountains through the quarter-cone of transparisteel to one side was spectacular, but Thinker had other priorities. He waited as the orderly who had shown him up here bowed out of the room and shut the doors. Alone at last, he opened one of his storage compartments and reached inside.

Out came the late, lamented Switch's electrum-filigreed datapad.

He placed the device carefully on a low table between two chairs and entered the passcode he had long since memorized by watching his former master enter it during so many negotiations. The accounts and investments were many, varied and generally small, but he quickly computed their total present value at well over two million credits. Plenty for his purposes.

He would need to be careful. Retrieving a credit chip from another compartment, he withdrew a little from each of several accounts: two thousand in total. As an afterthought, he performed a stochastic analysis of the price-movements of what appeared to be Switch's favourite stocks and rearranged the investments slightly. With the Sel Zonn underworld in what promised to be a long-lived and destructive power vacuum, Switch's various creditors and business partners would probably not realize the droid was gone for quite some time. Thinker didn't need two million credits right now, and the longer he could keep up the impression that Switch was still operating, the longer he could keep the Empire from investigating Deep Storage Bay V14 and realizing that MLP-32 had not been destroyed above Brentaal the previous year.

Assuming they still cared.

* * *

More than five hundred storeys below, hidden deep within the island that was Aldera's pedestal, Maya watched through an unitransparisteel window as Agent Krast's carbonite block was lowered onto a specialized operating table in a small, sterile room. This secret ASF complex, located directly below Organa's palace and accessible by a dedicated turbolift from his security office, housed everything from training facilities to data centres to armouries. Claustrophobic medical suites like this one, however, were where most of the terrible rumours had come from when she'd trained here. It was considered an open secret that they were most often used to keep doomed patients marginally alive long enough to debrief them, rather than with any intent of actually saving their lives. Otherwise, went the argument, why wouldn't they just send us to regular hospitals?

Well, rumours were rumours, and at least for today, they had a patient with little to fear beyond hibernation sickness.

Senator Organa and the ASF officer (Colonel Verana, as Organa had introduced him) were speaking quietly in the back of the room while they waited for the operation to commence. Captain Okeefe stood to Maya's left, contemplating the OR just as Maya was. The tension here was of a much worse kind than what she always felt before a mission; she was a helpless observer here, knowing they were about to get some bad news, but having to wait half an eon to get it.

The droids moving the carbonite into position finished by removing the repulsorlifts from its four corners and backing away. The block now fit perfectly inside its rectangular depression on the table, which would simultaneously liquefy and drain the substance to bring Agent Krast out of hibernation. The crowd of medical personnel from the landing platform now filed in as well, shrouded in white robes, hoods, gloves and masks. Every surface was white; the mottled grey block stood out horribly. Doctors and nurses stood in reserve, and technicians pressed a sequence of switches in the side of the table.

Almost instantly, the grey block began to glow a dull, reddish-brown.

Watching the carbonite shrink in on itself was like watching heated glass flow into a mould. It was almost a minute before any change was evident; the corners rounding, the upper surface sagging. It was safest to do it like this, especially when the patient's condition was unknown. The process accelerated slightly at the behest of the medical technician at the controls, until Agent Krast finally began to emerge. The toes of a pair of boots; the front of a careworn tunic; the tip of a nose. A pair of nurses stepped forward with a set of medical diagnostic equipment.

It was one of these two nurses who gave the first sign that Agent Krast might still be in trouble. As the ebbing lips of his carbonite envelope rippled down his face and exposed his neck, her eyes widened in shock. A soft, rhythmic beep started up somewhere in the background to indicate that the man's heart was beating again.

Blood spurted from a wound in his throat.

The techs backed off hastily as the medical team descended upon the operating table. Amidst the hurricane of snapped instructions, loading and depressing syringes and tearing gauze, Maya could just see Krast's face through a tangle of white limbs as he awoke. His eyes snapped open and he coughed, spraying the team with more blood. Once his throat was clear, he gave a ragged cry of pain and began shaking uncontrollably as though in a seizure.

"Damn it," Maya heard Verana mutter, "not again…"

A rolled cloth was stuffed between Krast's teeth to prevent him from biting his tongue. As the last of the carbonite flowed away, more wounds surfaced: gushing wounds on his arms, legs and abdomen; blaster burns; bruises; a broken arm; a missing ear.

Okeefe whimpered and dropped to her knees, her hands over her mouth.

Krast was now looking around wildly. Maya knew he probably couldn't see anything; his eyesight would take hours to recover from the hibernation, and the only interruption in the uniformly-lit white blurr all around him would be the vivid red of his own fountaining viscera. Nevertheless, he seemed to know which wall held the one-way window through which they watched, because he fixated on it and spat out his roll of cloth. Choking up a fresh gob of blood, he screamed, "ORGANA! ORGANA!"

Senator Organa stood with his face almost pressed to the window and shouted back, "Yes! I'm here, Agent Krast! What's happened? Tell me!"

Krast's features twisted horribly with the effort, but he kept screaming. "TRAITOR! TRAITOR! TRAITOR!" He choked again and had to stop. The doctors had obviously tried to sedate him, because his convulsions had slowed and his eyes were dropping out of focus.

Organa's face drained of colour as he backed away from the window. Colonel Verana was staring at him, disbelieving.

Anguish showed in Krast's expression now. Maya had seen that face before: his pain was receding, and he knew he was out of time. The EKG beeping in the background was slowing every second. The blood was no longer spraying in all directions, but it gurgled freely between his lips as he struggled to form his last words: "Fful… Ffelll…" Maya had to press her ear against the window, and saw Organa and Verana hurriedly follow suit. "Fffeluciaaa…"

The beeping of the EKG gave way to a long, soft whine; Krast sighed and was gone; and all was still and silent in the red-and-white room.

* * *

No one said a word on what felt like a very long turbolift ride back up to the Senator's chambers. Colonel Verana kept glancing suspiciously at Organa, who stared at the lift doors with his mouth set in a hard line; Okeefe was staring vacantly at a point on the opposite wall around knee-height; Maya avoided everyone's gaze but, like Verana, she kept Bail Organa in the corner of her eye.

Traitor? What could this mean? There was almost no chance she could be persuaded that the Senator himself was disloyal to Alderaan, but his face betrayed no hint of what else Krast's dying screams might have meant.

Finally, they reached the palace's summit. The lift's doors hissed open and Organa strode into the antechamber. Sweeping through the room in his wake, Maya caught a glimpse of Thinker by a huge window off to her right. His head rotated halfway around to regard her inquisitively, and she gave a slight shake of her head to indicate he should stay put.

The Senator led them quickly across a vaulted, transparisteel audience chamber and through a side door into a small conference room. When everyone was inside and the door had hissed shut, he turned and gestured for his three guests to sit. Remaining standing himself, he appeared to collect his thoughts for a moment before speaking:

"Let me first put to rest the suspicion you are all justifiably feeling right now: I am no traitor, and nor has Agent Krast discovered any. 'Traitor' is a codename. A senior Imperial naval officer confided his disillusionment to me more than a year ago, and has since been turned by the ASF. His last transmission came six weeks ago, and warned me that he would be out of touch for a few months. Well, there is nothing too unusual about that; I wasn't worried…"

He trailed off. Maya realized her mouth was hanging open, and quickly closed it. Okeefe had finally looked up and was listening raptly. Verana was impossible to read.

"Krast did well," Organa continued in a firmer voice, "everyone present was well-trusted and sworn to secrecy; his accusation of treason may worry them, but it will not spread. It was necessary for him to disguise his news; Traitor was known only to the Deep Core group and myself."

"We should assume this 'Traitor' has been discovered," said Verana, standing and moving to the door, "and it seems Krast knew where to look for him."

"Yes," Organa agreed, "Felucia. I trust you have people who can find him, then?"

"We'll find him," said Verana shortly, and he left the room.

The Senator stared pensively at the door for another moment before turning to the two women.

"I apologize for the urgency we've shown up to this point," he said matter-of-factly, "but it looks like you'll have a day or two to rest before we have a clear idea of what we're up against on Felucia. I'll have guestrooms set up for you, and please feel free to occupy yourselves in Aldera however you wish until I call."

Maya and Okeefe stood and bowed, ready to excuse themselves, but Organa suddenly held up a hand.

" _You_ , on the other hand," he said in a slightly raised voice, "will deactivate the antechamber's intercom at once, and then come in here and explain why I shouldn't have your memory wiped."

There was a faint _click_ from a ceiling-mounted speaker in the center of the conference table, and a few moments later, Thinker rolled into the room looking about as sheepish as a droid could look.

* * *

"Oh, yes! _Yes!_ Don't stop! Oh, Jarah – I'm going to – I'm – I'm-"

Jaramiah Keto almost burst a vein in his temple as the communicator buried in his discarded uniform at Alia's bedside rang at the worst possible moment.

He did the gentlemanly thing and waited for the gorgeous woman beneath him to stop writhing and quiet down in her own time. Then, in a herculean exercise of will, he pulled away from her and leaned over the side of the bed to excavate the buzzing comm. If Arandis had gotten himself arrested looking into that stupid droid on Blue Deck, he'd kill him twice! With the comm in hand, he rolled onto his back and allowed a moment for his breathing to slow. Alia pressed herself against his side and put her head on his chest with a contented sigh, apparently ready to fall asleep. What a waste.

"Keto here."

"Keto, this is Arandis. We're leaving. Meet me on Blue Deck in thirty minutes."

"What? Why? We still have two more days of leave!"

There was a pause. "I'll explain when you're alone," Arandis answered humourlessly, "Blue Deck. Thirty minutes. Sorry, Jaramiah; those are our orders." The comm clicked and died.

"Sorry, sweetheart, duty calls," Keto groaned, sliding his arm out from under what should have been the best lay of his life.

"No skin off my back," she yawned, reclining into her pillows to let the low light exaggerate her figure as provocatively as possible, "look me up on Alderaan sometime if you'd like a second round. Maybe somewhere without a signal."

He laughed in spite of himself, and leaned over to kiss her goodbye as he hastily buttoned up his uniform. "I'll do that."

* * *

Back in hangar control on Blue Deck, Lieutenant Arandis ordered the crew to clear the control room. He was satisfied that he had learned all he could about the previous night's bold escape, and he would soon be off on other business. Well, as soon as Keto could extricate himself from his latest knee-weakening shore leave sexathon, at least.

The expected transmission arrived on schedule. Checking around him one last time to make sure he had the room to himself, Arandis answered and snapped to attention. "Moff Caglio. Good evening, sir."

"Good evening, lieutenant." Moff Jamson Caglio, governor of the Bormea sector which encompassed Brentaal, was a middle-aged but fit and energetic man with thick grey hair and a clean-shaven face. Arandis had actually met Caglio through his father before he'd joined the military, but the Moff probably wouldn't remember that.

"I have some irregular orders to relay," Caglio remarked, settling back in his desk chair once he'd made sure Arandis was alone, "needless to say, they are classified and should be shared on a need-to-know basis only."

"Understood, sir."

"Good. Imperial Intelligence has a tip – they won't say from where, obviously – that a certain small, out-of-the-way detention facility is about to see some unexpected action. You and your partner are temporarily seconded to their service. You will take command of the shuttle _Valerius_ , currently berthed at Sel Zonn Station, and rendezvous with the _Excubitor_ in the Felucia system. Officially, you are there in your usual capacity as naval logistics officers; Intelligence has arranged some menial chores for your cover. You'll coordinate with Captain Vischera on the surface – I'm told you know each other already. Unofficially, there will be a datapad waiting in your quarters on the _Excubitor_ with further instructions. I'm afraid that's all I know. Any questions?"

"None, sir. We'll leave immediately."

"Dismissed, then. Caglio out."


End file.
